Project Hail Mary (2026)

This has been seeing a lot of discussion in my circles, including a slight spoiler I tried to ignore. I decided not to wait for the next spoiler to see the flick in a theater. Besides, at 156 minutes, it promised a good way to fill my evening.

In the near future, scientists discover star-eating microbes that could decimate Earth's population in a few decades. These "astrophages" travel to Venus to reproduce, so it's possible to collect some for study. Only one vaguely close star, Tau Ceti, has not been dimming. The titular project sends three astronauts on a long, mostly comatose one-way trip to find and transmit answers that might save their sun. For unexplained reasons, only Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) lives to wake up. Fortunately, he meets a sapient alien he dubs Rocky, on a mission to deal with the same threat to another star. Their combined smarts might be just what they need.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

This title had turned me off for a long time, especially with the silly punctuation, which does not appear on the poster. Nonetheless, it still enjoys fairly high ratings after 14 years. I chose it last night because it was the first movie to come up on my Netflix list and promised to be rather different from what else I'd seen lately.

In an unspecified town that might be in California, Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) is taken aback when his wife of 25 years, Emily (Julianne Moore), tells him she committed adultery with coworker David (Kevin Bacon) and wants a divorce. He wallows in self-pity in bars until annoyed lothario Jacob (Ryan Gosling) offers to teach him how to attract women again. Cal becomes a successful player, but he can't stop thinking of Emily.

The Nice Guys (2016)

I was not planning to see this so soon after other action crime comedies. But once again, Netflix said it would stop streaming at the end of the month. (Also, my smart TV will stop including Netflix on April 17, presumably for planned obsolescence, but my Fire Stick should take care of that.)

In '77 L.A., a suspicious death leads politically active porn actress Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley) to suspect that someone will try to kill her next. She hires thuggish Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) to protect her, and he attacks drunken, semi-competent PI Holland March (Ryan Gosling) for following her to try to resolve the first death's mystery. Nevertheless, Healy talks March into a team-up when they realize there are bigger threats to counter. Who's targeting all these folks in the porn industry, and why?

Barbie (2023)

I was reluctant to try something so polarizing. If nothing else, I figured that seeing the largest amount of pink outside of a nudist community would sicken me. But on a tiny airplane-back screen, that's not so risky.

Here we see Barbieland, home to live humanoids who mostly go by "Barbie" and "Ken," come into existence as Mattel makes their corresponding doll models, and change based on how the dolls are played with. The focal characters are Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling), whom I'll call SB and BK for simplicity. SB starts to develop realistic flaws nearly unheard of in Barbieland, so she travels to real-world L.A., where Mattel is headquartered, in search of a solution. BK tags along and discovers that Barbieland could become a lot more fun for the men -- at the cost of the women. He returns before SB does....

The Fall Guy (2024)

I had never heard of the '80s TV series of the same title. Fortunately, this is only a loose adaptation, so it doesn't presuppose much knowledge. The only detail I know would have meant more to me with familiarity was a pair of cameos.

Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a beleaguered stuntman, most notably standing in for obnoxious actor Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). A particularly bad injury dissuades him from further stunts, until producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) asks him to work on the directorial debut of his ex-girlfriend, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). Gail later confides that the invitation isn't really about the job: She wants him to track down the suspiciously absent Tom before the production fails. Colt always knew that Tom was troubled, but he doesn't anticipate what follows. Hint: The title has a double meaning.

First Man (2018)

I finally decided to give Damien Chazelle another shot. Perhaps the lack of jazz would help my appreciation. And the fact that he only directed and produced rather than wrote this time. Of course, even if he were the writer, he could do only so much to a famous true story.

The pic follows Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) from a 1961 spaceplane flight to shortly after returning from the moon. (I didn't know about the quarantine then; contagious lunar pathogens would be the least of my worries.) Quite a few obstacles occur in between: Cosmonauts have been winning every match in the Space Race, some tests end in disaster, and public opposition to this use of tax dollars is increasing. On a more personal level, Neil mourns a daughter recently lost to cancer but refuses to take time off, and his wife (Claire Foy), while supportive of his career, frets that she'll be the next astronaut widow.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

My past experience of Blade Runner (1982) consisted of watching the Director's Cut with my dad in 2003 and the Final Cut at AFI in 2015, the latter serving only to enhance my already great appreciation. I'd also read the loose literary basis, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in between, helping me understand a couple aspects that hadn't gotten much explanation on screen. Thus Dad and I independently got the idea to see the sequel in a theater before long. I can't speak for his optimism, but mine was cautious, noting that (1) long waits usually mean big differences, (2) people were saying nine years ago that Harrison Ford was getting too old to reprise his action roles, (3) Ridley Scott ceded the director's chair to Denis Villeneuve, and (4) Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty couldn't appear in it.

Thirty years after the events of BR, uncannily humanoid organic robots, called "replicants," have become common and mostly legal on Earth, albeit subject to rampant bigotry. Older models, which don't all have the limited lifespan from BR are less cooperative as slaves and thus marked for death at the hands of special forces inexplicably called "blade runners," who are at least typically replicants themselves. LAPD Officer KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling), usually going by "K," shows no desire to rebel -- until after the site of one of his hits reveals the fossils of a once-pregnant replicant. Since news of this possibility interferes with the public narrative that replicants are too distinct for human rights, K's boss (Robin Wright) orders him to hunt down and kill the now-adult child. His subsequent detective work continues to blow fuses in his head, metaphorically speaking; and the closer he gets, the more that certain parties try to remove him from the picture....

La La Land (2016)

Between its record-tying Oscar nominations and its high ratings across the main review sites, you might think this the best movie not just of the year but of the decade to date. I went in with no such assumption. One family member had had high expectations and was disappointed; another had low expectations and was impressed. It seemed only fair that my expectations be middling.

I had heard that it pays tribute to old-school musicals but is not like Glee. Nor, it turns out, is it to musicals what The Artist is to silents. It follows two present-day people who love different aspects of the past: Mia (Emma Stone), a barista who wants to be an actress and covers her room with classic film posters; and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a pianist/keyboardist with little interest in things outside of jazz, which can make it difficult for him to stay employed. As circumstances repeatedly bring them together, they fall in love, but the relationship has an awfully shaky foundation, tested by the dilemmas of whether to follow their dreams or settle....

The Big Short (2015)

Ah, now I've seen all the Best Picture nominees from last year! I would've waited a while longer, but once again, my dad had made the rental and I decided to seize the opportunity.

Based on a mostly nonfiction Michael Lewis book, the story focuses on a few men in three basic groups that never come together. In 2005, number-minded hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) discovers what a racket the allegedly stable U.S. housing market has going and then does what no one ever did before: a credit default swap that essentially makes a bet with several banks that the housing bubble will burst soon enough for him to profit overall. People who catch wind of the arrangement and decide to get in on the action include trader Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling); his associate, hedge fun manager Mark Baum (Steve Carrell); and relatively new investing partners Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jaime Shipley (Finn Whitrock), with help from trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt). It's no spoiler to say that they win in 2007. For the record, only Burry goes by a real person's name.